Using existing Samba installation for CIFS

we already have Samba installed and widely used across our organization. In order to have a smoother migration, would it be possible to continue to use Samba as the file management system of Alfresco? I don't mean to run both systems in parrallel. I mean to install Alfresco on top of Samba.

No, it wouldn't really make sense to try to serve Alfresco content through Samba: Alfresco contains a Java component called JLAN which implements alot of Samba's file-server functionality, i.e it presents access to files through CIFS, but behind this interface it is serving content straight out of the Alfresco repository (not just from the filesystem).

That said, I don't see why this should cause any migration problems: most basic CIFS operations on the filesystem will look pretty much the same to a user whether through Samba or through Alfresco JLAN. You should even be able to configure Alfresco to authenticate against the same back-end source as you currently use with Samba, or (probably, I haven't tried it) directly against Samba itself if you're using Samba as your PDC (but I'm not up to date with the latest versions of Samba in this respect – perhaps somebody else could comment). (Personally, I find that keeping user data in an LDAPdirectory (OpenLDAP) and using Kerberos for authentication is the bestsolution for using Alfresco with Windows clients.)

In short, the functionality that Samba would offer to Alfresco is alreadyintegrated into Alfresco in the form of JLAN.